Unto her was he led, or rather drawn, By those white limbs which sparkled through the lawn. Treason was in her thought, And cunningly to yield herself she sought, Seeming not won, yet won she was at length: In such wars women use but half their strength.' And so in nuptial bliss the night was passed, and when the midnight hours had sped, 'Thus near the bed she blushing stood upright, Brought forth the day before the day was born.' And thus this lovely poem was left, as far as Marlowe was concerned, an 'unfinished tragedy.' Had Hero and Leander remained, as its author left it, unfinished, it had been well; but, as it would appear, in compliance with some suggested dying wish of Marlowe, his friend Chapman proceeded to complete the idyll. The second edition of the poem, with George Chapman's continuation appended to it, appeared in 1598, the same year in which the first edition of Marlowe's portion appeared. Chapman was a man of considerable, albeit unequal, power, and of great command of language; but was totally unlike his dead friend in poetic fire. His long-drawn sequel has much retarded the popularity and weakened the effect of Marlowe's masterpiece. The fall from Marlowe and Youth and Beauty to Chapman and Ceremony is too disillusive. Let the reader close the book where Marlowe breaks off, with the roseate flush of his imagination still flooding the page, his warm passion still palpitating through the rustling leaves, and the music of his verse still lingering in the air, like the sweet South, that breathes upon a bank of violets.' There is another, a very short Fragment, assigned to Marlowe, in 1600, on the authority of the editor of England's Parnassus, in which anthology it appeared. The lines, 'I walked along a stream for pureness rare,' may be an extract from a charming poem, but in themselves the verses scarcely seem to call for the admiring comments they have lately received.135 It would not be surprising to discover that this fragment, fathered on Marlowe after his decease, whilst his name was one to conjure by, owes its origin to Michael Drayton. The author of The Barons Wars, first published in 1596 as Mortimeriados, may for some good reason, or even inadvertently, have omitted the lines from his printed poem; they certainly read like an extract from that portion of his work describing Queen Isabel's chamber in 'The Tower of Mortimer.' In those days so many poems were passed about from hand to hand in manuscript that when they were eventually printed, generally by piratical publishers, they were frequently ascribed to the wrong person. The Passionate Pilgrime is a noted case; some lines of Tamburlaine are seen to have reappeared in Spenser's Faery Queen; whilst innumerable extracts from Marlowe's poems and dramas are found embedded in the works of Shakespeare and others of his contemporaries. The pretty pastoral song entitled 'The Passionate Shepherd to his Love,' is the most known of all Marlowe's poetic labours, and, together with Sir Walter Raleigh's rejoinder, 'The Nymph's Reply,' has been included in nearly every English anthology of choice lyrical verse during the last three centuries. It was first published in 1599, minus the fourth and sixth stanzas, in The Passionate Pilgrim, a small collection of poems by various writers, but all ascribed by W. Jaggard, the publisher, to William Shakespeare. This collection, issued as 'by Shakespeare,' not only contained pieces by Marlowe and Raleigh, but also by Bartholomew Griffin, Richard Barnfield, and, when reprinted in 1612, by Thomas Heywood. Through this reprint of the piracy is known the fact that not only Heywood, but also Shakespeare, was indignant at the fraud, and compelled Jaggard, who may not have been entirely to blame, to withdraw the reputed author's name from the title-page. The publisher was not altogether without excuse for ascribing Marlowe's song to Shakespeare, seeing that it had been largely quoted from in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and, as was usual with Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, without any reference to its authorship. 'Come live with me and be my love' was reprinted, with variations and additions, in England's Helicon, another Elizabethan anthology, in 1600, and eventually, with other variations, in Walton's Complete Angler in 1655. In both these works it was assigned to Marlowe, and was accompanied by Raleigh's Nymph's Reply.' Quite recently a manuscript Commonplace Book of the sixteenth century has come to light, and amongst its contents is a version of Marlowe's song, differing from any other known one, and of Raleigh's 'Reply,' also with variations. Apparently all these various versions were quoted from memory, and as the Thorn borough' manuscript is probably the oldest, and contemporaneous with Marlowe, whom the writer may very likely have met at the Earl of Pembroke's, it is now quoted verbatim: 136 'Come lyve wth mee and bee my love Where wee will sitt upon the Rockes Where wee make a bedd of Roses A belt of strawe with Ivie budes wth corrall claspes and 1 (amber?) studes 1 Words erased in the Thornborough Manuscript-‘amber' and 'bud.' |
